I love this quote: it rips into Raph’s perspective and rips out the heart of it:

“Surely you don’t think that only those making FPS toys-for-boys worlds are the only world-makers? Surely the girl stuff can count too like houses and relationships and villages and continents?Surely you don’t think that only those making FPS toys-for-boys worlds are the only world-makers? Surely the girl stuff can count too like houses and relationships and villages and continents?”

Jim,

Here’s the link to the economic stats, such as they are:
https://secondlife.com/currency/economy.php

As for how much the club owners and event organizers make, unfortunately we no longer have transparency on their daily income levels as we used to have right in the user interface where you could instantly find out the “leader boards” in all kinds of categories (how much land owned, how much money in the account currently, etc.) — you could even find where you yourself were on the list — it would show just your portion of it and those you contrasted with.

But there was eventually a huge pressure on the Lindens to remove this for “privacy” reasons. The hugely wealthy didn’t like their wealth to be displayed and become a subject of envy. Of course some had already figured out how to hide their stats by making alts or groups.

So I don’t have ready figures for you to link to, but I would say that the top club owners are included in those top ranking people making RL income, and I know of some who make in the thousands of dollars US. They’re able to maintain one or a dozen islands and take home a profit after costs. A club is able to make income mainly from being a venue where content, music, and sex are sold and also home and land rentals. They clubs increasingly are small island economies that portion off some housing for workers that is sometimes free, sometimes for a low rent, some villas for more wealthy people, stores for content, and then under the old dwell incentive system, various things to make people stick on the property like dance pads. Then there would be call girls, the sale of porn streams, etc. The point here is that these clubs provide a socialization network for newbies and help people find their niche of RP or style or theme and also provide game help.

The sex trade is a turnoff for quite a few — then they can take another route completely and go to all the PG sims with very different kinds of clubs and groups with libraries, book clubs, poetry reading, gallery walks, etc. People make and sell original art, ebooks, “happenings” of various kinds, sometimes “mixed reality” with RL events. There’s a record company with an inworld record label of those musicians who got their start playing live in coffee houses and clubs within SL, and also those who are RL musicians now using SL to have concerts.

In other words, bring people together on a grid and give them tools and incentives and creative possibilities and they do the normal things people do anywhere in any town or village or city.

I don’t understand why there is this constant, constant harping about “Anshe as outlier.” I’ve said nothing of the kind nor is any of my argumentation leading to such a supposition. Just because i’ve described one very determined amateur who professionalized to the point of making that kind of income doesn’t mean I’ve somehow endorsed the outlier theory, this doesn’t follow logically at all. In fact, any of us doing business in SL are determined amateurs professionalizing at least within the context of becoming knowledgeable about virtual world markets and customers. There are hundreds of people who aren’t necessarily professional artists or designers but who mastered the PSP and other tools they needed to become successful in this world. I’m puzzled why this is so hard to accept. All you have to do is go to http://www.secondlife.com and browse through the classifieds ads right on the website:
http://secondlife.com/community/classifieds.php

People pay $50 US or even $100 USD to buy the top slots on this list — or pay merely pennies to be at least in it near the bottom. You can see from this kind of expenditure that people can justify such a cost because they make the sales to cover it. I just know personally from my tenants in various stores and malls that it’s common to make $10,000 or $25,000 per day, which is about $40 or $90 a day — for a content creator. Of course, there are the hours they labour to make the items, but then after they put it in a vendor to sell, there is no more cost unless they pay rent or tier — and they remove much of that cost posting on third-party shopping sites that take a small commission.

I’m not seeing it as a pyramid. First of all, there isn’t “taking money out of the system” — if I cash out $250,000 Lindens to pay tier, it means some other resident bought my $250,000 to buy content. It’s a normal currency exchange, not gold farming by exploiting loopholes in the system — it’s legal to exchange the game currency for USD. It’s not “capital flight”. I might also put it back into the world in the form of paying suppliers, buying prefabs, commissioning architects to build, etc.

I don’t see it as much different than going to Russia to start a business — costs, yes, hardships, annoying bureaucrats, yes, mafias and crime, yes — but rewarding nonetheless to be in an emerging and developing economy.

Yes, there are people who sink loads of money into this platform without making a profit. There are indeed people who do spend anywhere from $40 to $125 a month for a quarter or half sim or more ($195 for a full sim or island) in order to simply have a place to hang out, build, socialize, perhaps organize live music shows or various games, whatever. They have disposable income, and for them, paying the tier on the land, and buying content from others seems reasonable — they get something like a streaming movie they get to script and write the ending to, they don’t mind paying $40 a month for it.

Indeed, SL has an entire breed of entrpreneurs. It has reached the point where there is a stock market, banks, investment groups, etc. It’s all primitive still, but it is developing. The stock market just paid its second round of dividends (you can see that a http://www.slsolutions.com)

I guess I’m not so concerned about trying to convince you. It’s not Amway, after wall, it’s not a fake thing like that where you have to pyramid scheme and proseltyze. If it doesn’t sing for you, you won’t get involved in it. Pretty soon I imagine it will get a lot bigger and then seem normal.

Joe Public, one of the deep illusions of the tekkies in SL, and the Lindens, and people like Hamlet nee Linden Au in particular, is that there are “all these people in the humanities” in Second Life at the top of the pyramid. Well, no. Actually, *no*. That is, there are a couple. But by and large, what you mean are designers or arstists — people who may be graphic arts designers but who primarily work on computer graphics and on the Internet and have absorbed the whole IT culture — they aren’t people in the humanities in the sense of poets, writers, sociologists, etc. The lawyers, the writers, don’t rule. This is C.P. Snow gone wild in reverse — it’s not that the literary elite is keeping out the scientists — it’s that the scientists are saying that unless the literary can do blogs and tag delicious and load Flikr and do Digg and podcast, they can’t play. Acquire sophisticated technical skills increasingly complex with each new generation of technology, or shut up.

Michael, you can find what someone says worthwhile, but you can also believe they’re wrong. Obviously Raph Koster and most of the people here believe I’m wrong and are setting me straight. That’s fine. That’s what normal debate is about, two opposing viewpoints. There’s no need to have what in fact is actually a silly touch-feely etnic that we’re all supposed to be mind-melding here in the great Metaverse and grokking on the fact that we’re all sentient beings blah blah.

In fact, it’s not “touchy feely” stuff that I mean to bring in by bringing in more of the humanities — I find the scientific technogeek types are actually far more vulnerable to picking up all kinds of really illogical and emotional belief systems — you get technogeeks who sneer at the oppression of people under Christianity and the purveying of myths and then pick up up BDSM, pagan, and Wiccan as their belief systems LOL.

BTW, there’s no place in my posts here where I’ve called for any exclusivity for SL itself, nor have I said the future of the Metaverse lies only with SL. No place. That’s the sort of hysterical, exaggerated perception that comes from somebody merely coming along from outside your ranks and saying, hey, you don’t get to be the only ones in charge. You’ve now transmogrified that into some alleged hysterical call to make only Second Life the advance guard of the future.

That’s patently ridiculous. As I’ve written here and in other threads, I don’t see why this is an all or nothing proposition. Most of the people here are basically saying, “Games are from Mars, Social Worlds are from Venus” and basically dissing the girls’ games where there is a lot of house-holding and relationship-building and marketing of personal possessions, and saying that only the other kind of shooter/war/quest/game-games are going to have the cutting-edge technology. Like the “Mars/Venus” debate about men and women, it’s a pointless spiral since both sides have a little bit of the other side in them.

So, beg to differ — I simply disagree that the gaming worlds will have the most progressive technology AND I don’t think that those who create and rule these games then should have the last word on how the Metaverse is developed. I have yet to see a rational and persuasive list of the features now being developed in the Mars games that put them head and shoulders over the Venus worlds.

And there’d be no point in privileging SL in the list of social worlds necessarily, if people really found that Active Worlds, Project Entropia, A Tale in the Desert, Sociolotron, etc. really had substantive followings. They don’t appear to — though this could change. And there could be a new competitor emerge, and the new adult games or even something like IMVU could acquire substantial followings to dwarf all these others, like a MySpace.

It seems crazy to me to have this discussion degenerate to some sort of Pepsi and Coke branding war. People in SL can readily concede that World of Warcraft has better graphics, performance, compelling content, action, etc. and therefore justifying its millions of subscribers. Many of them play WoW in fact. But in reverse, the WoW admirers can’t seem to concede what is superior about SL, and keep dissing the activities exemplified by Anshe Chung as somehow already “been there, done that” or uninteresting.

Joe Public, you’re the troll, with your snarky remarks and personal attacks,

Now that IS the pot calling the kettle black!

and you’ve been reprimanded once by the host.

Mea culpa, but as explained in a subsequent post it was made, indirectly, in response to one of your posts

that those in the humanities should have as much a stake as those in the sciences.

They already do. Many, many, many of these already exist in SL and are doing some very interesting stuff.

I don’t understand the point of your ancient history lesson on the SL land trade. Mildly interesting, possibly from the stance of an academic research project into the evolution of a virtual world economy, but essentially the rules of the game changed and some eggs got broken…so what? Suck it up.
Life is pain, get over it! [heh, go the UT2k4!]

Everyone, and I mean everyone, in SL is an early adopter of a rapidly evolving technology platform and business model which incurs certain OBVIOUS risks [as well as the heady high of being able to promote yourself as a virtual business exec in the most cutting edge metaverse yet known to man.]

If you choose to gamble your business model on LL’s penchant for radical change of mind…more power to you! When LL decides to move out of the developmental lovefest that appears to be their model for innovative collaborative project managment [sic] things may get a little more predictable in this regard, but you would be a brave man, or woman or furry or ??, to hold your breath in this regard imo.

You drank the koolaid, whether you like to think you did or not, the moment you signed up. You appear to have drunk a few dozen gallons of it yourself.

You don’t live in the world that is at the cutting edge of the Metaverse. We *do*. … *We live here, you cannot dismiss us so easily.*

*furrows brow while trying to figure that one out*

SL is useful for prototyping interesting widgets and projects, very interesting 3D SNS, some cool new entertainment applications, and some even more interesting evolving RL/virtual business uses appearing on the horizon that are sooo much more interesting than the virtual slumlord model that you appear fixated upon…but good luck to them [and you] if this is how you choose to run your virtual life.

Personally I think SL is a great virtual toyland with all sorts of interesting possibilities in rl, virtual, and mixed realities…but imo it’s best to ride it like a surfer and not like pioneer trying to race for the goldfields in the wild wild west, hoping to make that big strike that will finally set you up for life. You could end up like most pioneers, lying facedown in the dirt with a backfull of arrows.

Heh, just to throw my thoughts into the ring…

- Anshe isn’t anything new. She is … a DEV. A dev of the Level Designer variety. She’s a player dev, which isn’t all that new, although the degree to which player devs are effective is a tribute to SL’s good design. As a platform.

She’s a very good dev, as noted by the amount of money she makes. Sure, there’s a little bit of the bad old parasitic speculator in what she does (hey, I play this sort of buy low / sell high parasite in EQ and WoW, I know there isn’t any redeeming quality to it) but I gather she’s a lot more creative than that.

- Second Life doesn’t eliminate the difference between “entertainer” and “entertained” any better than other community games do. Sure, it allows entertained to become entertainers better than most other online worlds, but just because people jump over the wall doesn’t mean the wall’s not there.

To prove this, just follow the money. It’s a pyramid, basically. At the bottom, you have people who pump money into the system. These are the entertained. At varying levels above them, you have the people taking money out of the system — the Entertainers (along with assorted speculator parasites.)

If SL truly eliminated the difference between entertainer and entertained, the money would circulate amongst all players as they each contributed their share of the entertaining and were remunerated by other players for their efforts.

- The thing that’s interesting, and perhaps even new, about Second Life is the degree to which the player devs have gained a stake in the ongoing management of the game. In many cases their livelihood depends on their ability to make a positive contribution to the gamework, and they want power in return — an interesting dynamic.

more popcorn?

The trend now is to sell more because people are looking for ways to sustain the tier or maintenance fees on the servers they buy.

Who are they going to sell to? *Each other*

So, I want to pay for my fees, and you want to pay for your fees. So I sell you a re-colored T-shirt for $150 and you sell me sandals for $150, how are we getting closer to paying our fees?

Do people in WoW have the ability to stream audio and video on parcels they own? I’ve never heard of that.

No one owns the parcels, neither do we have to pay rent beyond the fee at the door. Audio streaming is generally done with teamspeak or the like. For Video clips we go out of window. no one has yet suggested they’d like it streaming. If there was a market for it, a third party provider would do it. Actually, the changeable interface might support it. In that sence it is possible to add content right into the game, if everyone downloads the plug-in. I’ve only seen two-player tic-tac-toe added this way, but that was more proof-of-concept.

It’s interesting that you’re positing that if a person types in the third person about themselves in a game, that means they are more immersed. I’d argue they were *less* immersed.

Not at all what I said. In fact, almost word for word not what I said. I was talking about Identity Exploration. Since you didn’t listen to Bartle, I’d suggest reading James Paul Gee’s “What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.” It’s about masks, not pot holders. Sorry, gloves. It’s about thinking of the person on the screen as a real person, not a giant cursor.

Um, did you realize that by asking this: “why should they tolerate anyone selling what they are giving away for free?” – you’re not espousing a truth acceptible to all, you’re merely espousing a key tenet of the gamer geek curiously restrictive “technolibertarianism”.

Um, no, I was so unaware. I was talking, as I often do, about the ideas in the sentence itself, not how it might be applied to virtual worlds. If I donated food to a soup kitchen, and later found they sold the food, I’d think I had a right to be unhappy. If I let a friend crash in my garage for a while until he gets on his feet, and later found out he subleased to some whino, I’d be unhappy, even if he and the whino are long gone. I’m not talking about if it’s morally OK to rip songs from CDs and e-mail them to your friends. I’m not even saying you don’t have a right to sell what they give away for free, but you don’t even seem to extend to them the right to be mad about it. I’d ask you to reconsider. Consider instead that they gave it away for free thinking that new arrivals would need free content to get them hooked. A very old idea. And then consider that they are disapointed that it’s not working as they hopped because someone else has tainted their plans by selling what was free.

Rik, we did all those things in the Sims Online, and heck, people do some of those things in Neopets, and do some of those things in Runescape, and do all of those things in Sociolotron. So?

So we’ve come full circle. Second Life has some traits not common to other virtual worlds. It’s a place with tools to allow people to create content and it is easy to sell ingame content for real money and it has no theme/genre/story. That’s an interesting mix and I’m sure some very interesting things happen there. On the downside there is not a lot of developer-provided content and no clear dirrection for newcomers to take when they arrive.

You don’t live in the world that is at the cutting edge of the Metaverse. We *do*. … *We live here, you cannot dismiss us so easily.*

Umm, again, it’s a place with tools to allow people to create content and it is easy to sell ingame content for real money and it has no theme/genre/story. That’s cool and different, don’t get me wrong. I’m not dismissing you. You like Second Life, I get that. It’s cool. Lots of people like Second Life. I have friends in Second Life. I’m interested in Second Life and how this plays out. But it’s neither the Holy Grail of Virtual Worlds nor the better mouse trap. (Right now, Worlds of Warcraft would seem to be the better mouse trap, but a case could be made for Neopets or MySpace.)

Rik, we did all those things in the Sims Online, and heck, people do some of those things in Neopets, and do some of those things in Runescape, and do all of those things in Sociolotron. So? The point is that the SL experience, because it has enhanced capabilities for collaborative work, financially rewarding work that is legal within the world, rationality for hooking up with RL (you can put a lunchtime event with a RL speaker on in a virtual Austin Hall in a virtual Harvard, and be reasonably certain that while a dragon might walk by on the screen, it’s less likely someone will rape someone else on the floor or start clashing swords with them or cry that the lecture must be interrupted because of a sudden bear invasion. There’s no rules in the same way there are in wordly games or gamey worlds, no laws of nature to obey, you are freer to hook up with RL, and that means that you can

Do people in WoW have the ability to stream audio and video on parcels they own? I’ve never heard of that. But in SL you can stream Harvard into your beachfront cabana or whatever. It’s just the possibilities are that much more robust. You seem to keep whining that Second Lifers are over-enthusiastic about their little pet game. But it seems pretty demonstable to me that when the American Cancer Society wants to organize a wakl against cancer, they came to Second Life, not Runescape or ATITD, even though you can do a heck of a lot of walking in those games.

I’m wondering if you could put it this way — it’s people that can introduce a topic like gay rights into a non-gay environment that is even hostile at times to gay rights like WoW. But in SL, there is the possiblity to build gay rights institutions, events, knowledge repository, etc. and anyone logging on for the first time can access it. It’s a persistence that isn’t just about the visual representation, isn’t just about the streamgin video on the servers, but about the streaming social capital from people on those servers who have a way to leverage and aggragate and expand on their knowledge and connections. If the handful of people who brought up gay rights leaves WoW, where is the repository left behind? The next people coming along then have to start all over. In Wow, can you buy a parcel and build your own center and stream video in it and have flippable books and events on these subjects? No, of course not. If you do, you’re doing it in spite of the game, not helped by that game.

It’s interesting that you’re positing that if a person types in the third person about themselves in a game, that means they are more immersed. I’d argue they were *less* immersed.

As for “You can’t get out-of-character in Second Life because there is no setting for your character to have to mesh with, it’s all sandbox with no story” — baloney. The richness of your character in SL is boundless, and he fits with the world. You go out of character by logging off, not by interrupting your monster quest to talk baseball scores.

No, it’s not only that it “stops being fun and gets to be work”. I often call it Second Job. It’s that you don’t have the scope and the cost is prohibitive to make it STAY fun. You have to stop at some natural barrier like time or cost — unless you are as driven as someone like Anshe.

Um, did you realize that by asking this: “why should they tolerate anyone selling what they are giving away for free?” – you’re not espousing a truth acceptible to all, you’re merely espousing a key tenet of the gamer geek curiously restrictive “technolibertarianism”. There are classes and groups of people that do espouse this view. But it isn’t “the truth” because there are many other classes and groups of people that say, heck, it’s fine to sell freebies for what you can get for them, it’s a free market. There are those who live in rigid conformity to game god rules about content that border on the neuralgic when it comes to how content is passed on or sold, and then there are normal people fresher from the outside real world who there isn’t a thing wrong with taking a review copy they got from a publisher and selling it on amazon.com or selling a free CD they got as a promotion, when it comes to a single copy (not a ripped multiple copying). This is one of the central debates, BTW, in Second Life.

And that’s what I mean that you, and your brethren, and your technogeek philosophy, do not get to rule the Metaverse. There is a huge struggle in SL over the right to have yardsales. A tiny sect of oldbies and jealous content creators and those who flood the world wit freebies, abetted by Lindens, are savagely punishing people who put yard sales on the events list and ruthlessly trashing them in the forums. But these normal people who figure that in a game funded *by the ebay guy cough* you should have the right to sell used goods, even if they are free. You’re providing a service by making them able to be found in the sea of 10 million objects in SL. So it’s a debate, there are arguments to be had on either side of the aisle, but it’s a debate that many of us refuse to allowed to be framed only by those game gods and would-be game gods who are neuralgic about content they supposedly gave away to “help the community”. What better way to “help the commmunity” than by letting poor newbies make a few bucks off a recoloured t-shirt???

Funny, how people who get all misty-eyed about Creative Commons and give money to enable people to be paid in CC for giving stuff out for free and who are for ripping old dead white guy’s stuff and handing it off everywhere to kids, especially if they are in the third world, well, they become absolutely ballistic at the thought of Ryan Linden’s door and doorscript being sold for $5. Geez.

Re: making money in the game. Who are they going to sell to? *Each other*. Just like RL. And to new people. Nobody says you’re going to live like kings. I’m the first to say you only make some extra income this way unless you are willing to NOT bill your hours. But make it you can, and find plenty of new customers streaming in constantly.

It’s really quite facile to say it’s like Amway and floating on the sex business. Huh? People don’t make a pyramid scheme to sell overpriced plastic containers and bulk cartons of spaghetti, they sell avatar clothing and houses that people like and which are part of them creating their onlinle fantasy or presence. You crack me up, too, with your unwillingness to see it’s just normal, the way things work in RL.

Morgan, I don’t have the desire to teach you the fundamentals of the English language or of virtual business, especially you. Venture capitalists invest in SL. It is growing, it is attracting, and it is cutting edge. Is it profitable? No, of course not, they tell you that frankly. Is it near to being profitable? So they say. So is it an exact technical and scientific equivalent to always and everywhere say that “gorwing and being attractive and being cutting edge is profitable”. No, der, we got that. But is it *reasonable to assume* that venture capitals venture their capital and hope something stays growing and attractive and cutting-edge *so they can make some money*. I mean, this isn’t rocket science. So sure, we can contract the logical propositions here and point out that venture capitalists want something to be growing and attractive because *those are pretty sure signs that it is heading toward being profitable*.

Do venture capitalists sometimes just take a gamble and put something down on the roulette board just to enhance their overall position and reputation, to bet on a wildely-hued horse just to stand out, heedless of profit? Um, yeah, I guess they do. But I’m thinking it’s a pretty sure bet that they

Why is this so hard? Why?

… you’re missing the larger point about how communities are built within worlds

You never made that point. There’s no need to, it’s a given. People migrate from Virtual World to Virtual world, and sometimes take their communities with them. Happens all the time. I think you think that your Second Life Community is unique because of the discussion that you’ve had there and the plans you have made. But we’ve discussed Gay Rights in the WoW forums because of that thing that happened (which resulted in the guild recruitment channel). We’ve talked about adding Same-Sex Marriage to A Tale in the Desert (might be in Telling Three, starting soon). We donated virtual coin in City of Heroes to be sold to help the victims of 9/11 (in violation of the terms of service). We’ve talked about what a cry-baby Anakin Skywalker turns out to be in SWG. Most of these topics will be addressed again in Seed. Some of those people will be from these other communities and carry with them that knowledge.

In SL, you don’t have to get out of character, you can get in or out on any sliding scale you want, the whole out-of/in-character distinction melts away. Now, isn’t that great? Isn’t that freedom?

… They talk about themselves in the third person that way and type out their emotions instead of just speaking normally

Going a bit further back, I recognize that. But I was mulling this over earlier today, and see how the second quote simply shows you aren’t getting it. You aren’t having the experience that Richard Bartle hoped you would. When I type “Kir nods” I’m not talking about myself in the third person, I’m talking about my character, my avatar, in the third person. Thus I am able to create a new separate identity and thus I am able to learn from the experience. You can’t get out-of-character in Second Life because there is no setting for your character to have to mesh with, it’s all sandbox with no story. Next two people into the room could be a robot and a walking copy of Barlett’s Familiar Quotations. You can’t make your backstory fit with everything, so instead you go-with-the-flow.

I asked my son and his friends why they tiered down in SL and sold their large holdings of land.

I wonder if the answer isn’t a shorter “It stopped being fun and started being work.”

(I contend they are merely engaging in reputation enhancement which is required for social and economic advancement in SL, and their altruism is only as far as their tolerance for anybody reselling their freebie — then they become hysterical).

Um, why should they tolerate anyone selling what they are giving away for free? That said, this is a common problem in the game worlds too. Someone will give away stuff or selling at near cost, totally undermining the players who want to be traders and crafters. They do it because helping people is fun.

The trend now is to sell more because people are looking for ways to sustain the tier or maintenance fees on the servers they buy.

You crack me up, you really do. I suggest for the Virtual World to survive it needs more people to arrive and they might not be good consumers. You counter with “More people will be selling stuff because they have to pay their rent.” Who are they selling too? Where is the money coming from? Because the model most people use for playing Virtual worlds is a flat monthly fee of around $15 plus they have to have an internet connection. I’ll pay $25 a month for a better game. I’m not paying $250 a month for a better game; it’s simply not in the budget. “Oh, but it’s OK because you can make money in the game. Invite all your friends and they can all make money in the game, quit your day jobs and live like kings.” Didn’t I hear this speech once before? Yes, he was trying to sell me Amway. The way I see it, either there are no consumers for your content providing machine or the whole system floats on the money made in the virtual prostitution business. Either way, the emperor has no clothes.

“Hey, I’m done with this thread.”

Amen to that…given the fact that your last post is littered with gross generalisations, trite assumptions, and the usual litany of bogus, argumentative tripe.

All kudo’s to anshe, btw, for making an income out of SL…but the only person who knows how much she actually makes IN PROFIT is Anshe herself…and continually trotting out secondhand figures of 150k to act as the primary case study for your argument is rather loose. Business week focused on land and currency holdings which is able to be loosly verified and estimated by the current exchange rate.

In games, a year is a long time, two years, 5 years, wow. These LL VCs have been there for a few years. That’s pretty long term, seems to me. The attraction for some of them is the idea that this is more than just a game and that it is a platform with business or educational or non-profit uses, too.

what does it matter what kind of different VCs there are? There’s a fundamentally incorrect thing that was previously stated, namely, that just because Anshe uses this game/world/platform/thingie to make her $150,000, and is therefore dependent on those servers and that world, that there is something ephemeral or illegitimate about her $150,000. But why? They’re more real than the ephemeral earnings of goldfarmers which first of all, aren’t always legal to make and withdraw under the TOS, and second of all are much more risky — I don’t know the window open for most goldfarming in games but it seems like due to the risk, that you have to get in and get out fast. More importantly, as I already explained, you don’t dis somebody who runs a consulting business while leasing a xerox machine or a computer, these are tools, you don’t say, “they’ve exploited these companies to make their money” — the tools are designed to help people run businesses, in fact.

I don’t know what “I don’t think so” could possibly mean, except a misunderstanding of my phrase. Let me repeat: the expenditures of time and talent that people like Anshe — people inside the virtual worlds developing them (not the VCs) — are way out of proportion to what the venture capitalist expends. That’s simply true. That is, a venture capitalist doesn’t have to work 16 days in a sweat-equity proposition, he just plunks down the money and then watches how the company performs, by attending board meetings. He’s on a yacht, sipping Campari, she’s pushing prims and struggling to put out balky prefabs on laggy sims.

I hardly see that I’d need any kind of course in investment funding to understand these basic premises, and I understand a lot more about it from experience than you might imagine LOL. The VCs put money into a company like LL because they hope it will grow and be attractive and cutting edge.

THEY don’t complain that Anshe makes $150,000 and gets on the cover of Business Week. THEY don’t call her an “outlier” (in either meaning of the term, whether a statistical oddity or a person remote from the village). THEY don’t dismiss what she does at a certain level — she’s a selling point for them. That’s why it’s odd for people to be picking on her in that fashion, when she is part of what sells the platform as something workable, and that is supposed to be the tide that raises all boats.

I think some people are so conditioned to seeing the aberration of a goldfarmer striking it rich that they continue to see people making money in virtual worlds as an oddity and as faintly illegal or unsavory. I suppose that image will cling for some time.

Hey, I’m done with this thread.

That is, to clarify: if I lease a Xerox, buy a Dell, lease a postage meter, etc. and have a business selling newsletters and doing consulting, you don’t say that I used these large companies “for free” to make my $50,000 a year. You just say I used tools and technology to do a business. There’s no sneering about it. That’s why I don’t get the sneer about Anshe doing the same thing.

Why would I want to dress up like a knight or an orc and go be stuck in the middle ages swinging my sword around for a limited, rote set of functions that go nowhere? It’s just not interesting.

I realize this is a bit late, but I think it might bear mentioning as to why game worlds still have some importance: By your logic, why would you read a book written by someone else when you can buy a MadLibs and just write your own story?
Sometimes it’s fun to just consume content in an environment where you aren’t necessarily required or able to modify that content. I think the number of players for game worlds are a testament to that fact. Sure, you can implement (to some degree) these worlds in SL, but they are still going to be that limited set of functions, they might even have knights and orcs!

>That there is little magic in turning 40 million in venture capital into one pile of $150,000 and a bunch of piles of $150, esp. if the piles don’t add back up to the cash you started with. Even less impressive if those piles belong to someone else.

Oh? That seems an odd way to run the numbers and an even odder way to judge a game. Of course, we’re in new territory here, as there never really have been games or virtual world platforms with uses ranging from entertainment to education in which subscribers could make a profit. In the traditional model, for a game or cable TV, the subscriber gets a service and pays a flat fee, and the company tries to sell him various featurse and add-ons beyond the basic service. Built into the subscription fee and also his other ventures like stock, etc., is the model for his profit. Venture capitalists don’t try to calculate their profit by examing whether one million customers’ income makes back what they put into it — as you say, that’s other people’s money. What they would be interested in I would imagine is ensuring a long-term stable return on their investment in a business that was so attractive as a platform precisely because people saw it as a tool for enhancing their income, like investment in a xerox machine or fax machine.

Honestly, you really seem to be matching apples and oranges here. The return on investment isn’t judged by what the customer makes, at least not yet, at least not until we see if this is the model for virtual worlds. LL says they aren’t at the profit point yet but they claim they will reach that this year, I guess it’s like amazon.com

Raph, I’m still not hearing what is *new in games now* that is cutting edge — the shopping list of the Next Big Things out of *existing games today* — you keep proving the point (which I accept) that these other older games had the same features (like scripting in the furries’ game). Of course, I *am* wondering if they had scripting that was as robust, accessible to all users, able to be manipulated by all users so that elements could be built up in products, innovated at the same velocity, and sold for the same kind of profits as in SL. But perhaps this is like trying to ask whether the digital camera sells better and has more features than the Polaroid camera when it first came out, it’s always going to be relative.

>to be exact, the admins abdicated their position of privilege and simply agreed to implement what the game’s citiznes as a whole voted on. So it wasn’t a democratic experiment embedded within an authoritarian world, it was actually a democratic world. For a little while, anyway.

I take your point. Maybe it was easier for admins to yield their privileges when masses of server farms and massives of income weren’t involved from selling servers as land, and masses of venture capital weren’t involved (I’m just going to make an assumption that LamdaMOO didn’t have the scale and magnitude of those things, even if it had its own parallels).

The Lindens are going in the opposite direction from democracy, however, still feting, still culling and filtering and picking out junior game devs and world stewards out of the elite now with this new “Second Life Views” program where they will select top residents to come on trips to Linden Lab in San Francisco to discuss features and policies.

Given that in many countries more than half of marriages end in divorce, it’s not a bad idea to stand outside of divorce lawyers’ offices and ask people what they think of marriage. Some people like to explore what makes people come to games. I happen to merely be positioned to explore what makes people leave games. It’s fine if it is biased, it is one more report to add to the pile of already biased reports skewed in other directions. Of course people come and go from worlds, and leave them, and sometimes never come back, and sometimes stay. I don’t know why I have to take a swipe about “role-playing”. Why do I *have* to role play. Something automatic happens when you go in a virtual world and you access some different parts of yourself or perhaps you express yourself differently but it’s not planned and rehearsed, and it’s all you. It’s the “many I’s”.

I don’t claim that my math there was some kind of precise science, there’s an obvious fact not explained — that there are hundreds of people buying private islands who elect to hide them from view so they aren’t counted. Not sure if the new economic statistics LL has put up of 800 plus owned islands includes the hidden ones.

It’s impression that someone makes $150,000 after the steep costs of tier, labour, etc. because they are making it in a virtual world. And it’s just as important if someone makes only $150, if they made in a sense “something out of nothing,” something on gossamer wings.

Raph, I appreciate all your links and I’ll study them carefully. I didn’t mean to “misrepresent” your position, I just don’t happen to know what you said at some talk in the past that I may not have pulled up on Google yet — it’s just not being familiar enough. I’m happy to get more familiar but I don’t think it should take *lots* of site visits to all kinds of games — that in fact are not “where it’s at” — to get the answer to the question: where’s the game that isn’t *like* a social world in that it might have a customer-content factor, or might have some income-generating factor — where are the games that are BETTER than the custom-content and income-generation of SL? Well? I have enough criticisms of SL, as do others, that we’d be only too glad if you pointed us to such a game/world/thingie.

You’re the one who said there wasn’t enough arguing at the Metaverse conference, so I’m arguing *shrugs*. It’s peculiar to me that you keep banging on this question of recognizing that text games are the grandfathers of social worlds — I quite recognize it, stated it, acknowledged it, but here’s where the fork is: are they *also* grandfathers of *the latest advances in technology and pushing the envelope such as to show a direct lineage*?

For this to be pursued fruitfully, we’d have to ask what is meant by “more advances”. Player governance? Well, ATITD has that. Corporate takeovers? Well, EVE has that, etc.

Here, it seems that it’s social worlds making these innovations and not game worlds, as advanced as they get, and as much as both they owe to that grandparent of the text-based games. (But I personally don’t feel a need to make an all or nothing proposition, they’ll both advance, it’s just that for most ordinary people, the social worlds will be more of a draw.)

The fact is, text-based role-playing is subsumed into a social world like SL, and people never go back. And some of the other games you’re mentioning are games that emptied out, past their prime.

I have to say most of my experience of other games, whether its Furcadia, Active Worlds, City of Heroes, Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, A Tale in the Desert, the old text-ones etc. etc. comes from *my customers who left those world to come to SL*. Some of them set up the exact same thing they left behind, same builds, same stilted way of speaking. I can recognize all the denizens of all kinds of text-based chat and RP games and sites by their way of talking like this: “*smiles*” or “*makes happy yelp of anticipation*”. They talk about themselves in the third person that way and type out their emotions instead of just speaking normally. So I have an admitted skewed sample here, but I have to say: those games are things that people *left and didn’t go back to even if they loved them so much they recreated them in the new country*.

I’ve been to Active Worlds myself, a number of times, and tried to get along in it. It doesn’t cash out, as we say. I have many customers from AW who are excellent builders in SL. They don’t go back. AW has some of the features people like in a world; but not enough.

So it’s important not to lost sight about what this discussion at this juncture is about: what are the *advantages* of game worlds such as to *prove* that they are better than social worlds on the whole as innovators and as “where the future as at”. The job is not to show merely that game worlds have the same stuff as social worlds. They have some of the same stuff, great. They have different stuff that’s better, great. But do they have so much the better stuff as to be the wave of the future? I don’t think so.

You seem to be digging up dozens of examples that show that either historically, text-based games or MMORPGs have *the same features as* the social virtual worlds that came later. Yes, they do, we recognize that they have the *same* or even in some cases features *better than* the social worlds (better graphics, more compelling RP because the NPCs do the donkey work for you etc.) OK, but that isn’t what we were asking, is it? We’re asking *what makes the game worlds be at the cutting edge then, what makes them be the matrix for innovation then*. And that’s not what you’re answering by dredging up an example like Active Worlds, a world more narrowly constricted than SL, a game that doesn’t cash out, a game people are leaving, etc.

You can agree that Active Worlds isn’t at the cutting edge of the Metaverse, right, Raph? So take that logic through the rest of your answers. Is LamdaMOO at the cutting edge of technology and development in the Metaverse? Etc. Obviously we have to distinguish between their metaversal or pre-metaversal qualities that are useful to know about and appreciate, and what is at the cutting edge. Cory asked you to list your game world’s advances in cutting edge technology — so obviously bringing up Active Worlds or LamdaMOO then isn’t a fit, because they’re not advancing the entire field.

(BTW, quaintness is fine by me, I still play Cyberflix’ “Titanic” and I dig out “Dust: Tale of the Wired West” and play the bounty hunters section.)

I’m glad you clarified that in your book, entertainers can be *players* or residents of virtual worlds, too. Good!

>..”the right question is “what about all the innovations from ten years ago that aren’t IN current worlds like SL?” As just one example that should be near and dear to your heart, why hasn’t SL (or There, or whatever world you choose) tried the innovations in democratic administration that LambdaMOO did?”

Totally is the right question to ask. So where are they? Not in games or worlds at all? On a social space somehwere on the Internet?

You mentioned LamdaMOO’s far-reaching social innovation of democracy and whether SL has this. Answer: of course it does. There are already experiences in democratic administration in SL, some several years old now, that residents organize themselves, like Neualtenberg (which I think of as not democracy but social democracy) which is less democratic, but surely it fits into your category; there are also experiments in non-democratic governance like Gor; there are emergencing models of communities with rotating stewards and governance on the fly in group IMs like the Independent State of Caledonia; there are all kinds of groups struggling with the issues of establishing rules and creating mechanisms for dispute resolution, i.e. like the rental communities and the Ansheland continent of Dreamland. That’s EXACTLY what I began my critique with saying that PRECISELY because I feel we are making these discoveries and innovations and experiments in just these areas, and not just out skilling and questing, that we should count and that our worlds-without-worlds should be recognized.

Nobody is going back to LamdaMOO to experiment in this way because the very same thing and more is available in SL (or even TSO if you want to work it that way or ATITD). And they are atracting non-gamers — I guess that should be an interesting test, too, the degree to which a game or social world can attract brand-new users who never gamed or used worlds or even social software before (I see a fair number of them in SL).

So, in sum, yes, I’ll read your history, your references, and go questing, and talk to the bosses, and try to beat the bosses, and try to get the gold, Raph, sure. But I do want to suggest that when you or those in your guild or fraternity of game devs have to make the case of “why games” or “why games help our destiny” or “why games both entertainment games and serious games are going to make us better human beings” to the chair of a Congressional panel, to network television anchors, to university presidents, to all kinds of major opinion makers, just telling them to go skill up by participating in these actual games is just not going to cut it. The argumentation has to be based outside the gaming itself. Since SL is not a goal-oriented, skill-up/quest/kill/loot/apprentice etc. game in the same way, I think it just makes it easier to make the case for virtuality to these opinion makers using that medium.

I’m going to refrain from any long diatribe against Powerpoint and how it makes every mundane thought seem like the aphorism of the ages just because of its layout. And I won’t make you more testy by frothing about technolibertarianism and the tekkie wikinista ethic I abhor, other than to say that they never have a tolerance for letting the technology that they claim exclusive ownership and knowledge over be used for something other than technolibertarianism; and the creator-fascism they spawn is only a hair’s breadth away from their “libertarianism”.

I don’t think games help you find your destiny. They delay and distract you from finding your destiny, unless your destiny includes finding another gamer like yourself and getting married in RL, only to have an affair online again with another gamer. I think social worlds may have much of the same problem of being a diversion. Yet I bother with them because I still believe in their transformative power and the leveraging of the power of the amateur.

I think that for MMOs as opposed to VWs (thie distinction being than an MMO is conceived as a vehicle for one or more presupplied games) the glove analogy is actually better in the majority of cases. It’s not “roleplay” for most players, it’s not about character for most players – roleplayers are always a minority which is which i’ve claimed before that MMORPGs do not exist.

The glove analogy gives us use of the character as a tool and is far more apt for the endless crop of levelling MMOs.

>>Let’s stay away from flame wars please. Debates over one user’s QoS to another user in a game I don’t run are more than a little off topic.

Agreed, Ralph, but I was actually making a roundabout point based on a response from Pork.

>>If you go to “test somebody’s QOS” in a belligerent manner in a virtual world

Actually, they were completely non-belligerant and done in good faith looking for a specific service. It worked..to a point, but I made a commercial decision to move on, find a better service…problem solved for me, on a number of levels as a matter of risk management.

>>Most of the rentals are filled right now, I dunno, must be doing something right.

mmm…in the wider context of endelessly rolling out Ansche and yourself as examples of virtual worlds Best Practices, you might just want to rethink your position as a “successful” virtual land baron giving you the street cred to be Vigilante Gal for the Meterverse Justice watch, zooming around the blogosphere in your blue rinse, red cape and “Hammer & Sickle” aimee weebler undies fighting perceived virtual injustice wherever it may lie.

Your “success”, as may well be for many early adapters(? sic!) , could just as much due to luck, timing, laws of supply and demand, etc etc as it is to any actual skill in running a virtual business.

Try reading http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ for some more perspective as to what may be some of the reasons behind your virtual “success”. As one reviewer says on Amazon “fun to read, highly original though very very arrogant” so it should be right up your alley!

>I tried you out a couple of times as an SL service provider and I’m afraid to say I found your QOS rather lacking. Ernest, but just not up to scratch…despite your “extensive experience” with “hundreds of loyal customers”.

Shrugs. Most of the rentals are filled right now, I dunno, must be doing something right. I think when you hide behind a nick and can’t face the music as who you are in SL on public blogs, your motives will be seen as suspect, especially given your track record over at the Herald and my blog. If you go to “test somebody’s QOS” in a belligerent manner in a virtual world, might could be they see through the crap and move on : )

Michael, it’s not about derision, but just bewilderment. Why would I want to dress up like a knight or an orc and go be stuck in the middle ages swinging my sword around for a limited, rote set of functions that go nowhere? It’s just not interesting. I’ve played enough of them to get the idea, and had kids and relatives and friends I’ve watch play intensively and I keep up on the thinky literature when I can. I dunno, maybe this summer I might have some time to go skill up somewhere. I’m not getting what the rest of your insults are about, they don’t seem pertinent to the discussion.

ooo….popcorn time again!

Wow, you could almost cut and paste Prokofky’s diatribes into a book and call it “A Theory of No-Fun” by Prokofy Neva of the MetaverseWatch.

Poor Ralph…never even saw it coming;-)

Rik wrote: … but why do you log in? What’s fun?

Do games need to be fun?

Rather, I want to be *doing something* and in SL, you get that feeling of accomplishment.

Other than making money, and sculpting the lifestyle (that’s making laws and talking with others about what other people whould be doing), what is it that you do in SL that you enjoy? Not why is it important, I accept that it’s the first graphic game to use this business model and that it has unlimited potental because anyone could create content for it, but why do you log in? What’s fun?

>Prokofy, a fair amount of the language you are picking on, such as “common good,” is actually lifted directly from the documents I was imitating.

Raph, actually you’re wrong about any “lifting of language” at least when it comes to the UN documents. Indeed, even where you might be “lifting” you’re quoting out of context and without heed of my other point of how such such documents come about — in a multilateral context with pre-existing institution, procedures, shared goals, compromises, etc.

I actually know a good deal about this subject, but don’t wish to cite that here. While this is going to take a while to explain, if you’re serious about pushing your avatar rights, and you’re actually believing (mistakenly) “based them on international rithts documents,” I’ll have to disagree vehemently with you. If you take but a cursory look at UDHR, for example, which is the basis for many other international rights documents you’ll discover there isn’t any phrase or notion called “the common good” as any kind of central organizing principle of rights themselves* — and thank God for it!

Rather, “advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people” — but the rights themselves are inherent and are not housed in a putative “common good” concept.

You’ll see that far from housing the notion of human rights in “the collective good” — making a hortatory, undefined, and illusory “common good” as the foundation for rights — this Declaration does something very, very different.

Like the U.S. Constitution says “all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator” — signifying that each and every *person as an individual* is endowed by something higher — imbued with rights from on high — so the UDHR says preamble recognizes:

“the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”

It doesn’t *start” with any hazy notion of the “common good” — it starts with the inherent dignity of every single individual human being.

This is a very, very important distinction and understanding to get right before embarking on entire exercises in drafting manifestos, laws, virtual worlds. If you don’t get it right, you will privilege the group-think and their advance-garde wizards every time, and enable them to stomp on the individual avatar, and wind up calling him a “troll” if he persists in fighting for his freedom against you.

The reason I’m even bothering on obsessing with this now is precisely because of the coming revolution of groups through social software and the accompanying overhyping of groups uber alles as some kind of defining principle in society, that will obliterate indiviuals AND the state and its protection of individuals. This is very bad stuff.

I won’t belabour the points, but just look at the language in the document, really:

“the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom”

In the dignity and worth of the human person — even in a non-religious setting like the UN, what you see here is *faith in something higher, faith in fundamental human rights, faith in the dignity and worth of the individual — and not the collective*.

The common good might be the *result* of the implementation of these rights. Yet these good people who hammered out the UDHR did not start with the premise of “common good” nor claim to identify it. They identified something higher in which they had faith — the rights themselves.

This “natural rights” belief often runs counter to the geeky, nihilist stuff you find all over the Internet these days overthrowing God, religion, the state, politicians all these people doing things by “remote control” as Stewart Brand said in the Whole Earth Catalogue, who must be rejected in favour of the immediacy of “direct democracy” (which, as we’ve seen in SL, is coded by geeks deftly to leave out the NO vote).

Yes, there’s “approval voting,” and it’s pretty insidious stuff in a context where there is no normal, transparent democracy, and not even the two other branches of government for checks and balances, but a very overambitious and overreaching executive branch (the game company).

Everyone is social-engineered into ‘approval’. Nobody can ‘disapprove’ because, why, it’s the “approval” mechanism, and why, we just find that just so much more fun and positive than that old “no” vote! Game devs get to think their game fans are all wild about point-to-point teleportation, for example, because a dom and his subs on the Gorean sims are able to rally hundreds of flash-mob votes. Nobody can show that there might be some backwash from such a policy (destruction of business, the grey squares from poor texture loading, the 128/128 sim landing lottery, etc.) Nary a discouraging word is every heard.

I suppose if *even you* find it sucky trying to make an avatar in SL, gosh, they really need to work on that interface stuff better. I guess I just skipped over that stuff as too tedious and hard. I never learned to use the gestures, my avatar just is in his library suit most of the time and even store-bought prim hair is a stretch. A lot of the depth of the game for people comes in fixing up avatars with not only the library sliders but the customized stuff and aquiring and deploying literally hundreds of wierd animation overrides — imagine someone going to the trouble to make “brushes hair nervously off forehead” as an avatar animation — seems like you could have left that one behind in RL lol.

When I say the Lindens “took the game out of the game,” I mean they took the idiocy of the routines, the talking to the NPCs, the beating the bosses. I dunno about you, but I get damn sick of hearing those swords clash all weekend long out of WoW from my kids and their friends playing it, and listening to that cheezy Hollywood-hero-upsurge orchestral music lol.

What happens is they all burn through these games and tire of them, they never go beyond — they burn through the content and the game devs have to think up new gifts or shards or bells or whistles. Sl seems so different because you can keep pushing at the outer issues yourself without having to prod game devs. In fact, to the extent the SL experience still has so much of that “let’s push the game devs or suck up to game devs and get what we want” quality to it, it’s a game, and not a more interesting world. I finally made a closeable box with a lid and a hinge and a door script today — it’s a little feeling of accomplishment that getting “10″ on my “cooking” skills in TOS never gave me (mainly because the box-lid thing sticks and enhances, whereas the skill-ups were always degrading with time passage).

Of course, there’s still way too much game in SL, and I blog about that all the time, what with this hippie dope-smoking circle-jerk of a group tool set they have that idiotically distributes all group income and expenses to all members of the group (they’re slated to reform this).

Still, I can only figure there is a considerable fork here in the discussion where I guess people will just have to agree to disagree:

>- no, it’s demonstrably less fun, to the vast majority of people, in SL than in most any of the gameworlds

Not everybody needs or wants a second life. Some people want a game. I find I can’t sit still for any game any more, even the ones inside of SL, they make me feel like one of those caged animals at the zoo running through one of its instinctive predictable routines typical of captivity. Rather, I want to be *doing something* and in SL, you get that feeling of accomplishment. Perhaps I’ll conclude it’s illusory — cocaine can make you feel like you’re accomplishing something, too. But it seems so, now.

I agree that there’s a lot frustrating, and not so much “fun” in SL. I think like TSO and a few other more social-y householder games, SL will be fun for very different non-geeky kinds of people, and that’s why I think geeks need to pay attention to it more because it will take off without you.

>- the gameworlds have historically been what has driven adoption in virtual spaces

I blink at this in disbelief, simply looking at this world of yours from a very different place. Sure, driven adoption of virtual spaces — but virtual spaces in games. Sure, WoW took further whatever UO or SWG — is that your point? (Do you lie away gnashing your teeth over this?) But…so? The fans will burn through that content, the world will be hollowed out, and in 2-3 years, players will be “playing in the puddle of our former game,” as one person once explained to me about their experience in a shooter game ruined by cheat hackers. It got like that with TSO, when they made those dumb milkshakes, and all of a sudden everybody in SimArts headed for the hills — of SL, like a stampede.

But…the innovation of virtual worlds outside of games — and games are still controlled spaces with fourth walls intact, remember? — that will happen in SL and things like SL if they appear, or RL thingies like Google Earth that will hook up to them. (I really hate saying this cutesy new buzz term “mash up” because frankly, I think a little more care should be exercised in splicing stuff together than it seems they’re implying with all this mashing.)

>- the gameworlds have historically been what has driven lasting innovation

Well, what if they lose their edge, Raph? If anything, maybe some of this “lasting innovation” has to be thrown overboard. This insidious levelling and skilling and wizarding stuff hard-wired into every “game” is pretty awful stuff for a template of a civilization that actually has to have people really live in it for any serious length of time for any serious enterprise.

I personally don’t want to guild-bond with other people dressed in Medieval attire, finding it fascinating to skill-grind and kill monsters, and I don’t want to be in an apprentice system of “create or die” or “skill or be killed”. The social Darwinism and Dark Ages type practices of these games and virtual worlds aren’t at all attractive to the layman outside this world, and people are just going to walk around the robots to get where they need to get using virtual worlds, without all that drek.

I’d have to understand a lot more about what you mean by “innovations” and see the list of evolutionary progression of games from the age of survival to the age of heros and the Iron age and so on, you know, PacMan emerges and just eats the dots, Dig-Dug kills the evil thingies…UO finds and hordes the red hair dye…Sims Online washes the hair in the shower…SL creates each prim strand of hair — I just don’t know enough about these games to see what you’d identify as evolutionary progress, and I bet I’d disagree with it anyway.

>- the future of the metaverse is going to come from gameworlds, not freeform social worlds

Totally wrong. At a certain point the gameworlds are so hobbled by conventions and foolish consistencies that the social worlds will be the only place where innovation can happen because people will have the hook and pulley of monetarization of their time on line and aquiring of skills that translate to greater being-satisfaction and financial satisfaction. Also, don’t forget that the sex is just so much better in the social worlds! I don’t know how those ugly hordes manage to get it on in a place like WoW especially with all that armour on!

These game devs with the shooter and sandboxy games will be noodling around in those game worlds and they’re going to get a lot prettier and run faster and such, but then suddenly the Metaverse will come up and bite them on the ass!

By then LL Bean will have try-before-you-buy avatars and catalogue clothing in 3-D and Citibank will have visual representations of your CD’s maturity and expected social security income upon retirement and you’ll actually be able to see a visual time-lapsing colour-coded representation of the lettuce at the D’Agostino’s as you shop online so you can actually tell which ones are fresher! By then RL will have gotten to be so virtual worldy that fooling around in a game gutting an orc for gold will seem like a PacMan — each one of these well-resourced huge entities like an Enron with staff and money to burn on this stuff will have games-within-games and prizes galores. You’re not going to want the helm from Runescape anymore or the precious metal out of WoW when your gas station has ore objects in its 3-D Gold Rush game you play on a console while you wait on line in RL, which is complexly networked to your telephone company’s quest, so that you save up the ores like coupons to get a discount on the gas later or trade it for cell-phone minutes. It’s just going to be everywhere.

>I think there’s a good case to be made that the lack of instant verification tools like PayPal actually leads to more interesting social structures and economic epiphenomena.

Oh dear, you’re reaching on that one, Raph! If you have to start that old “interesting social structures” routine as a placebo for the inherent satisfaction in the age-old human activity of buying and selling in the marketplace, well….Ermmm…even losing money in Second Life, the wisdom you acquire is priceless. Oh, come on, nobody REALLY fines interesting the economic epiphenomena of the price of ore in Project Entropia…unless it REALLY can be cashed out by lots more people!

I’d be happy to let go of social world exceptionalism if I could see any actual affect on the RL culture and events of the outside world by these masses of game players. That is, not the epiphenomena of magazine articles and talk shows saying everybody’s in a game killing orcs, but the actual impact of gaming on something besides just a chat at the water cooler that’s merely updated baseball scores with horde skills.

With Second Life, there’s no more water cooler, and no more scores-talking, because your entire life changed, presumably, in the way you combined the real and the virtual. I don’t want to overstate this, and I think it won’t be an all or nothing proposition. Games draw masses and the pay is high there for the devs, so the mechanics and engineering developments may necessarily happen in game-games — but social worlds are where people are going to be well, social, so they’re going to be where the rest of us are, and are going to be just a lot more philosophically important. That’s why I think these issues like “no no vote” are terribly important to bother with now.

(Just cutting and pasting some, his full text is just above to refer to.)

I’m getting the distinct feeling that you’ve played a lot in these other games, but only read about SL or just parachuted in briefly. Sure, in WoW on the market you get to figure out which stuff sells or doesn’t. But it’s nothing like the complexity of RL, and that complexity is more approximated with SL and more amplified, accelerated, and manipulable.

Trying to undermine my authority? No need. Playing the beta of TSO is as close as I’ve come to logging into Second Life. Well, that and listening to my wife talk about PernMUSH. Otherwise, yes, my online time has been spent elsewhere. Mostly the traditional places, but I’ve also spend some good times in ATITD. As for your next point, that running a business in Second Life is closer to running a business in RL, I’d agree. After all, running a business in Second Life is running a business RL, and for that reason it’s not a good learning environment. James Paul Gee talks about the “Psychological Moroatorium” Principal, where learners can take risks in a space where real-world consequences are lowered. The works if the stakes are fake gold, and making a sale means you can get a pretend sword. It doesn’t work if making a sale means getting real dollars, losing a sale means losing real dollars, and that someone else might miss a RL rent payment because you did create a better virtual mousetrap. Further the more variables and the competition from professionals do not make it an easy environment to experiment in, and experimenting is key to active learning.

Yes, guilds in WoW tend to center around playing the game. Yes groups in Second Life don’t, that’s because there is no central game, so they are what some would call diverse and what others might call chaotic. But people do get on their Teamspeak and suggest a parade, and parades do happen in Ironforge from time to time, and if you want to call the parades in Second Life content and the ones in WoW not, I can see the point. But I would hold that the PVP and RP servers have tons of player-created content, from random acts of violence to weddings. It’s not the same as being able to take a screen shot and saying “Everything you see here was created by a player.” But I’d have to ask, are they players or subcontractors?

Furthermore, I’ll suggest that you wouldn’t have as many as 2,000 people making substantial livings to cover all their RL bills in SL, and many thousands more making a part-time living, and even teens earning $50 USD a week in content sales, in any other VW setting.

Again, this is another “look at these number, that much cash must be important.” Compare it to the number of accounts Blizzard has closed for gold farming, and see if they still look large. “Ah,” counters my virtual-strawman, “that’s why the word Substantial was used.” Bah, overseas cheap labor will take away those jobs as soon as the market is ripe for them to do so, if they haven’t already.

>unless that fool has martial arts expertise, futuristic weaponry, the ability to fly, and a scary mask

We have all those things and more in Second Life.

Prokofy > and you need to have more of the type of those envisioning ‘the road less traveled by…that has made all the difference.’

Couldn’t agree more. Doubt not that you are an influence.

Prokofy > Oh, bah, SNOOPY, of course a roadmap is predictive.

Yes, I mean not one lone prediction, not one single future. Not one ‘this is what it will be.’ But an inventory of ideas and predictions and possibilities, side by side to see the schools of thought, look at the assumptions and expectations. I think that’s the most helpful thing right now.

Morgan > Keep in mind that Feynman was not a clean speaker, even when talking about physics. Expletives deleted.

Ah, the Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume 1, chapter 26, Optics: The principle of least time. I’m not a physicist but I used to gobble up everything there I could grasp the shape of and that specifc class has been stuck in my head for years. Funny enough it came up yesterday in the sunshine in the park (one of those light does funny things conversations)…before the rain Prokofy mentioned, which was equally nice.

Wow, what a debate.

Leaving everything else aside (as I am not qualified to commen t), it seems to me that the bulk of the subtext dialogue here is “Don’t you summarize me!” vs “In summary…” and I think both approaches are relevant and proper and ought in fact not to resolve without friction, or at all. If the anthropologist were intellectually indistinguishable from his object of study, what’d be the point? Likewise, why have subcultures if there’s nothing there that can’t be intellectualized?

Prokofy: Um…so…do the player-owned houses in your other games sell outside the game? Do they change hands in an internal users’ market? Can people sell them and even fund their college education like SL architect Lordfly Digeridoo claims …. Do these sales cash out and pay the actual RL rent?

I suspect without the very expensive sale of UO property for very real dollars there would be no basis for an experment like Second Life. Can you buy them in game for out of game money? No, and you can’t do that in Second Life either, as I understand it. You have to get it converted somewhere. Many people do however sell for real dollars on exernal users markets, such as eBay. Yes, people have sent their kids to college on what they have made in more traditional MMO games.

Raphl: I am pretty much positive that more teenagers have learned how to run businesses from UO and SWG than have ever LOGGED INTO SL. You’re making your case for exceptionalism on the wrong points here.

Prokofy: By gold-farming and skilling up levels. It’s really a grind. I think SL is just that much more creative and flexible and cashes out to real money that you can put on PayPal and not hoist out of some gamers’ gold farm exchange

You seem to be missing the point, running a business isn’t about how you make the Mcgriffen so much as how you sell it. Standing in Ironforge trying to sell enchants you can learn about customer service, supply and demand, and developing repeat customers.

Look at it another way: In a traditional MMO game, you make money from killing monsters. In Second Life you make money by creating content (which you then rent or sell), which can be anything from a t-shirt to an escort service to making a place where people can kill monsters. Blizzard hired a bunch of guys to make content, Second Life allowed people to hire others to do so and this is give Anshe Chung a very profitable year. But really, if Blizzard had hired someone out-of-house to make their new expansion, and you found out the lead designer made $150,000 would that suprise you? And other than who creates the content, and the fact that Second Life allows you to trade in-game money for RL money and all the games have that as against the Terms of service, what’s so different here?

It’s a map, with roads, you drive on.

The map is not the territory. You don’t drive on maps… unless you’re frustrated.

Ironically they shut down thought and new ways of looking at things …

The point that Drucker makes is that innovation doesn’t occur by simply thinking or talking about innovation. Innovation occurs by doing what needs to be done to make that future happen. When you’re sitting on the sidelines, or at home watching television, you can’t legitimately claim to be a player on the field.

The best quotes are short and sweet, especially in light of Prokofy Neva’s extremely lengthy (too lengthy) replies.

I never worry about the future. It comes soon enough. — Albert Einstein

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. — Richard Feynman

And just because I thought the following quote relevant to games…

There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It’s a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you ‘play’ with them! — Richard Feynman

Keep in mind that Feynman was not a clean speaker, even when talking about physics. Expletives deleted.

>I am not trying to paint you as a raving fan. I’ve read your blog — I know you are not. But you clearly are a passionate believer in what Second Life is trying to be. I mean, these are quotes from you:
“LL made the Metaverse you could really go and live and move and have your being in.”
>Those are the statements of someone passionately committed. Not to SL’s management, but to the thing itself.

Well, sure. And you’re *not* passionate and committed to your end of the Metaverse pond? Of course you are! And I guess I’m merely saying that for someone as big and important as yourself — someone on that big IT list of 800 plus names that includes you and not Philip Linden BTW (LOL) — it just seems like a natural fit that you’d want to try some of the things you do in RL, so to speak, right there in SL. But I guess from your perspective, it makes no sense. I’m not seeing all the parts of the elephant here, I guess, and I hope to become more familiar with them to see why SL isn’t compelling for someone like you. Not everyone wants or needs a second life.

>No, you brought it up. The specific quote:
“That’s my point, Raph, sorry but, as I said, you didn’t have Anshe Chung — who reportedly makes $150,000 a year from her world-creation business and who was featured on the cover of Business Week.”

Yes, you’re right, I brought it up, and in exactly that way, because otherwise, I find that if I say, “Hey, these are all the cool world-developers in SL” they aren’t compelling to important outsiders, and the mainstream media, unless you give them the little categorization tag they can use to compartmentalize it way up on their list, which is “she made $150,000 a year”. If you say “she rents or sells little dollhouses for girls to play in and even boys when they can be reluctantly torn away from their shooter and invention games” you’d roll your eyes. It’s very hard to convey.

But I figure that given your interest and background, you’d be able to see it’s more than just playing house or playing store.

>Dude, you’re telling ME about houses and player villages? Give me a break. There are probably still more player-owned houses in the games I’ve worked on than in all of Second Life.

Wow! Well, yes, I’m testicular that way, I guess, in ways that the truly testicular aren’t LOL. Um…so…do the player-owned houses in your other games sell outside the game? Do they change hands in an internal users’ market? Can people sell them and even fund their college education like SL architect Lordfly Digeridoo claims (of course there’s more to the story there, but let’s just take it at face value now). Do these sales cash out and pay the actual RL rent? Probably not.

>The “person makes virtual communities” story and the “person fights powerful authoritarian government to create civil society” stories aren’t why anyone talks about Anshe. They talk about Anshe because Anshe is on the cover of Business Week and made over $150,000 last year, as you yourself said.

Yep, I realize all that, but that’s why I invite you to take on the story deeper, and that’s why I think Anshe belongs as a conference of something as august as mapping the Metaverse. I guess I just feel that Anshe and those like her in smaller ways, and I’m one of them, feel like outside the immediate issue of the technology, we already got started on really making the Metaverse, and I guess we feel as stakeholders, we should be recognized. This concept of stakeholder was one that we also tried and failed to get across to the Lindens, so it’s not surprising that others fail to recognize it. Still, eventually it will overtake your awareness, but not because we do it, but because a 1000 others do it.

In the Metaverse, the bright red line, the border between producer and consumer, that you’ve kept as a holy province unto yourself as geeks for far too long, will be destroyed.

>Because after all, the “person makes virtual communities” story and the “person fights powerful authoritarian government to create civil society” stories are old. Old wine, new bottles. Yes, all the details are different, but the storyline is the same.

New bottles that actually shape the wine and its taste. That’s why it is different. I do believe it is a categorically different order of human experience. Hamlet is sort of stumbling around that on his current blogation about “orders of experiences” i.e. the embodied, immersive experience of perceiving oneselse in the virtual world.

>When I play these games, I play incognito. I am not particularly interested in being a Net celebrity hanging out in SL. I’m much more interested in MAKING these worlds.

OK, that’s interesting I suppose, but perhaps you could then start a Second Life? A non-Internet celebrity. Or, risk finding out that even if you went around with an avatar’s actual name the Lindens gave you, “Ralph Koster,” that had a group title, “Internet Celebrity” that probably 75 percent of the people wandering around SL now wouldn’t recognize you? They’d have no idea who you are? They’d maybe even not care? I’m sorry to put it to you that way, but Internet celebrities, as big as they are in the hothouse world of those immediately involved in making and caretaking the Internet, aren’t known to the wider public. You know, the Internet hasn’t been around really THAT long. Why, when I was young, we used to roll up documents and put them in these pneumatic tubes to have them air-delivered around a building LOL.

All you’d have to do, is take that trivia list you just blogged about and put it out there to the masses, they’d not recognize probably most of the names on it.

>Then write a new one. Seriously. Write one tailored for Second Life.

Yes, sure thing. I began doing that last summer, back when we composed various principles and statements to King Philip when we first made the Metaverse Justice Watch and then other groups broke off and attemped this, like Concerned Residents or Residents Action Committee, etc. There have been lots of such groups springing up in the last year. The clashes caused by the Lindens co-opting the main resident-created, independent currency exchange, the GOM (making even a household verb as you may have heard, “GOM-ing”) and other actions like the telehub removal made avatars begin to declare their rights against the game-gods.

I was hoping that when we were going through this exercise, that your avatar bill of rights, which I found and read then, since you said it was founded on the old principled documents like the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and such, would be a perfectly good document to cite (I think some did, some didn’t).

But upon closer examination, I found some serious, serious problems with it. I imagine since 2000, all kinds of debates have been held on this, and I just haven’t caught up, but let me just deal with one glaring issue — collectivism touted as a school of thought, or as an organizing value, or as a and social system rather than individualism. Communism v. Capitalism, if you will. The typical geeky, leftoid sort of issue often encountered on the Internet. The RL UNDHR actually was a grand debate on just these issues pitting people like Eleanor Roosevelt against the Soviet ambassador to the UN. This split between individual freedoms and duties to the collective continue to plague UN debates to this day.

># Avatars are created free and equal in rights. Special powers or privileges shall be founded solely on the common good, and not based on whim, favoritism, nepotism, or the caprice of those who hold power. Those who act as ordinary avatars within the space shall all have only the rights of normal avatars.

Created free and equal…but then whoops, a committee, a troika, a revolutionary body (Bolshevism) come along next to take all this away! How? Because “special powers or privileges” are going to be granted! By whom? Who gets to chose? How? On merit? On the strength of connections? Worse, the principle for such dispensing of special powers is…not the law, not the rule of law, not an institution with democratic and transparent participation but…”soley on the common good”. Well, geez, Raph, who gets to determine THAT? THAT is going to be a “self-evident truth”? Of course not!

What’s good for experimenters and scripters is absolute unrestraint on the operation of scripts, including those that push and bounce and even crash your game. But what’s good for householders and settlers is to be free of the annoying consequences of overactive guns and overaggressive security scripts that push and bounce your avatar to kingdom come or teleport him home or even crash your game. So what is the common good here? A balance would have to be sought between sandboxers and settlers. Who will get to decide? The Lindens? But they’re biased in favour of sandboxers who help develop their product, even at the expense of settlers who pay for their bottom line. So what recourse is there? Civil war? Civic struggle? I point to this as just one of the drops in the bottomless well of issues to be decided.

You cannot decide what the common good is, you, your geek pals, and your confreres at these conferences. That’s what this is about. You just *don’t get to decide what the common good is because we all don’t agree with you what is common, or what is good*. That’s what this is essentially about. There doesn’t have to be agreement. There can be management of conflict.

But you’ve completely unleveled the playing field and thrown the game pieces off the board by this propagation of a belief, an oldfangled belief in newfangled cyber clothing, very deeply held in the geek/Internet/google/wikipedia ideology, which has no responsibility to any higher concept of a public commons (except what “the group decides”), which overcelebrates libertarianism or licentiousness, and which cannot conceive of any restraint on the individual’s endless rights (forgetting Article 5 of the UDHR which says none of these rights can be used to overthrow any of the other rights).

With “whim, favoritism, nepotism, or the caprice of those who hold power” — you seem oblivious to the old problem of Bolshevism which is that people purporting to seek the common good, people claiming to be the advance guard of what is the common good, people who claim they are able to identify what is good for people, are able, on a whim, with favouritism, with their pals, and with utter arbitrariness, to do what they feel like doing. This is one of the deepest evils of MMORPegism — the wizards, mentors, wise ones, who are arrogated about the citizenry with special powers which they believe they’re entitled to have by manifest expertise, without any restraint or transparency or accountability.

In the name of overthrowing the nepotism and favouritism inherent in meat-world institutions like “the White House” or “the U.S. Congress” you’re going to institute something worse, more like “the Politburo” in that it is a group of self-selected caretakers who believe they are altruistic and serve the public — the public that they never really wish to consult (for proof of that, we can see the lists of those at these conferences).

># The aim of virtual communities is the common good of its citizenry, from which arise the rights of avatars. Foremost among these rights is the right to be treated as people and not as disembodied, meaningless, soulless puppets. Inherent in this right are therefore the natural and inalienable rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

Oh dear. Where to begin? The common good again? And who determines that? And whoops, we went from a perfectly good notion of inherent and inaliable rights *within the individual* — that is, existing in the individual first and foremost, as self-evident, as proper, as inalieable — and whoops, we leap-frogged over to conferring this — taking it away from the individual! — to this very vague notion of “the common good” which is now to form the basis, justification, substrate of rights. This is hugely dangerous. It means anyone can come along and pull the rug out from rights. The individual doesn’t have them. I can come along and say, “Joseph Brodsky isn’t a poet, he’s a parasite, he doesn’t contribute to society, banish him” etc. I hope you can see this.

There’s also some definitional issues with a phrase like “the right to resistance of oppression” — at which point does the body politic stabilize and have checks and balances instead of endless revolutionary resistance, etc.

>1. I don’t actually care what happens in Second Life except abstractly, and you care deeply. I know full well that I don’t know the details of what is going on in there, and that’s why I wouldn’t step in to support a Prop of any sort. I wouldn’t do that out of ignorance.

Well, if the inability of a voting system created by geeks not even to have the *right to vote NO on it* doesn’t trouble you, Mr. Avatar Rights Bill Author, and you feel the need to “get more information” then I suppose this is a hopeless situation. Either you understand that every voting system has to have a “yes” *and* a “no” or you’re going to be willing to wait until, through game company insider connections, you get your friend Cory Linden to explain (and I hypothesize) that, say, the reason he didn’t put in the “no” was that he wanted “positive contributions” and “constructive suggestions” and “to reinforce the positive” and “not accentuate the negative” and a 100 other geeky and wierd hippie justifications for disenfranchising the very right to fight opppression you just got done affirming in your own bill of rights. So, that’s ok, but when this thing gets bigger and still has no “no,” I hope you pay attention then.

>2. As a fellow developer of virtual worlds, I try to stay out of critiques of the administration of other worlds unless it’s something I feel really strongly about. Especially given that given my relative notoriety, even a small comment can be writ large.

I can understand, but you know, I began to debate you for really one simple reason: you were the only one reported at this conference who was willing to say “there isn’t enough criticism of this stuff”. All the others seems to be drinking the Kool-Aid.

I guess we who live under the tyranny of the virtual worlds, who live under the lash of oppressive governments, which are the dark side of the brightly-hued game companies that show such a kinder and lighter face to the outside world, have no other choice but to try to speak up and hope our cry is heard by other game companies or game makers or world makers so that they begin to realize how important these issues are to customers/avatars and not keep stepping on them.

My God, Raph, how can you make a voting machine for the Metaverse, that has no “NO” lever??? My God, how could such a thing happen?

Let me suggest that such a horrible thing could happen precisely because somebody, somewhere, on the Metaversal Revolutionary Committees, said, “it’s in the interests of the common good for us not to have negativity and criticism on voting machines so we’re not going to have any NO votes”.

I *hope* you can see how Orwellian this is!

In general, Raph, I don’t think it’s a good idea in RL or in sim life to have one person or one group issue a proclamation/rights manifesto that is itself a product of an internal process that isn’t a representative government or group consensus itself.

Putting it up in public and seeking comments is good, but it’s not a substitute for sequencing this in what might be a more effective way, say, by first making civic groups, or “committees of correspondence” or whatever civic movement or umbrella effort gets started, have people discuss the rights they want to affirm and claim, and then work on them in assemblies, congresses, conferences, whatever — the governance structures themselves are what have to help make the document credible.

Any group of people getting together to discuss this will not readily achieve a unified or harmonious view of what is the “common good” — they’d first have to identify a sense of shared purpose, goals, and create some kind of vehicle/group/IM sessions/whatever to then work on this draft of a rights document.

>It’s a good post. But I gotta say, knowing Clay, he’d think of YOU as one of those “members” who are “gardening.” By the force of your arguments and your postings, YOU are one of the caretakers of culture in SL.

Yes, but I’m not a caretaker of the dominant culture at all in fact, by trying to go against the tide and create a wider and more tolerant culture. Caretaker only in a more abstract sense.

>Heh… FWIW, I don’t actually think that that’s the place to do it. I think it will take a new platform. You don’t actually know whether I am off theorizing fruitlessly right now, or actually doing something, either.

Ok, be mysterious!

>The thing they have in common is that they are all believers in at least some of the core ideas that SL represents. Otherwise, they wouldn’t BE there.

To be a disbeliever but to be engaged because of what is at stake isn’t being a believer, and it’s especially not drinking the Kool-Aid. That’s how I’d see myself in this world. I can only believe that it’s important and influential and engage it, I can’t believe in *it* as a project of people with whom I do not share any sense of collective purpose, to the extent to which they’ve revealed it, which is only partially.

>Here, I think you are minimizing the amount of passion and social development that happens in the game worlds. I think if you reversed your challenge to me, and gave a given game world the same sort of attention you give SL, you’d find that in fact, similar meetings happen, with similar issues of governance, censorship, cliques, and so on.

Well…I don’t go in all these games, no, but I read the Herald, the Terra Nova, etc. and I have to say, I don’t see this rich robust list you claim. I see the main story coming out of WoW to be the issue of a group that involved the gay rights issue, for example, but not a long list of issues. I see censorship happening on something like MySpace about UTube (or was it the other way around? I forget). Oh, I’m sure they all exist. But I don’t see it as deep and multi-hued. Of course, I’m not in the magic circle of those games.

I did see these issues come up quite a bit in TSO. And I realize they do in WoW because I have friends and kids who are caught in it. But these worlds don’t accomplish something I think SL is unique in doing: both creating the fourth wall, the proscenium arch, and making it permeable and not noticeable anymore, depending on how you decide to interact or zoom around your camera or perceive it. WoW violates the fourth wall of a TV set or a movie theater or a theater, but once you get inside WoW, you merely hit the next fourth wall of the little game world itself (the fifth wall?). SL both violates or crosses the fourth wall, but then doesn’t set down a new one in front of you, so you can then endlessly make the fifth, sixth, if you will. That’s what’s different.

>I am trying to think of another way to put this… frankly, I do not have time right now to invest a workweek of time into SL, because I have my own things to do. You’ll just have to judge me by my actions once I can actually put what I say into practice.

Oh, I quite realize that’s a putdown, and you’re busy being the Internet Guru and such, that’s all well understood. And I didn’t imply an entire workweek, but an hour. But it’s just a challenge, it doesn’t have to be accepted.

>LambdaMOO was not a game. LambdaMOO was, frankly, EXACTLY LIKE SECOND LIFE except in text. It had quotas for building. It had HUGE debates about government. They actually TRIED direct democracy, so maybe they were ahead of SL on that front. They had an “architectural review board” that approved what people would build, which caused a massive stink. They had people so invested in their virtual lives that one guy actually got another FIRED from their RL job over a virtual dispute.

OK, well, I’ll take your word for it, and I know from books like “My Tiny Life” which I’ve seen referenced and have read the excerpts from, that it is very compelling and very social and intense. I didn’t realize the bit about the RL job but sounds so very SL. OK, you win on that one but…Harvard didn’t go there, Wells Fargo didn’t go there, and Business Week didn’t go there LOL.

>I’ll pick just one: I am pretty much positive that more teenagers have learned how to run businesses from UO and SWG than have ever LOGGED INTO SL. You’re making your case for exceptionalism on the wrong points here.

By gold-farming and skilling up levels. It’s really a grind. I think SL is just that much more creative and flexible and cashes out to real money that you can put on PayPal and not hoist out of some gamers’ gold farm exchange.

>You’re the citizen there. It should be YOUR bill, not mine! FWIW, I’ll cheerfully endorse ANYONE pushing for that doc in ANY game; I always have.

If you have an avatar there, that’s all that’s required to be a citizen. So you’re one, yourself! Unless you care to qualify yourself as a tourist LOL (a category that Anshe once made about people without any kind of social or technical or financial stake in SL who just hop in to try to free accounts, to everyone’s undying amusement which has cost her griefing ever since).

You know, I can’t really start up the project of disseminating your bill of rights when I have very fundamental disagreements with their conception, and the manner of their issuance — but then, I’m happy to say I don’t know enough about them, and have to read the history of the discussion of them. Just taking them as a document on the Internet, I think they perpetuate the tyranny of the wizard class that we need to overthrow, by introducing a self-styled foundation for rights within “the common good” rather than within the individual and within the law itself, a higher concept. I could conceive of starting discussion groups around them — but I’d have to *believe in them* to disseminate them.

I’m thinking SL just isn’t at the stage yet where one person or a group of people sending around lists of rights is going to get any traction — I suggested that what would be required is someone with your stature with a reputation for world creation and so on stepping up to the plate to give it visibility. But it’s not your project. You’re willing to do it on the Internet, but not inside just one of many worlds, I hear you.

*settles in with popcorn*

It’s very curious to me that you conceive of Anshe as an “outlier,” and that “outliers” are merely people who boringly make money off a platform, as if doing that is some kind of skill-grind and gold-farm that doesn’t involve having a stake in its development — as if the development of platforms and technology and such are just your area, and the rest of the activity in and on and around the platform is just for the fans.

I find there’s a horrible, horrible, hangover from this MMORPG culture you’ve all imbined for decades that is hugely destructive and is near to strangling the infant of the Metaverse in its cradle. You conceive of worlds as if they all involve skilling, leveling up, killing orcs, and getting advice from NPS and Wizards. YOUR goal is to be the ultimate Wizard (like a resident becoming a Linden). But there’s no objective need to force these memes and cultural institutions of MMORPGs, with their rigid, stratified, tekkie-serving forms of governance on virtual worlds just because they’re virtual, and you can fly in them. None whatsoever. Indeed, to the extent that we can shatter this horrid MMORPG culture with its fanboyz and resmods and alt-outings and rare-hoarding, we’re be that much farther ahead.

It’s an outrage to think that Hamlet nee Linden Au could speak for any of us inworld, when he is merely a former house organ writer, or government public relations officer, paid for and hosted on the Linden servers, who covered what was important for LL’s own sales and profit, but not necessarily what was important for the development of the world itself, or the Metaverse as a project larger than LL, whatever it’s control of the servers. To say that it’s “just as good to have Hamlet” because he can presumably speak in a savvy and coherent way at a sophisticated university or industry panel and people who “just make money” are chumps is to miss a lot of what is important and different about the world.

Anshe or any of us inside of Second Life aren’t just fans, and we aren’t just making money and we aren’t just a big server load test of feebs and choads and blingtards. We’re the pioneers in this new country really trying to live in it as if you could really live in it. Anshe has a lot to tell you about not just merely the flipping of land and the making of money, but the really intensive and numerous issues of how you create virtual communities, how they get along, how to do dispute resolution, how to devise and implement rules and devise them, how to deal with arbitrary and unfair state policies, how to compensate for world exigencies on servers and the limitation of tools, and a hundred other useful ideas, issues, and realities of virtuality that you seem unwilling to concede as a field of expertise or knowledge.

Your part in it is never a game, eh? It’s always us playing the game. But you get to play the meta-game of talking about the game at a panel in Panelverse, so you are better? No.

The outlier status of Anshe even in your defined notion is debatable. The story is about Chinese immigrant coming to first one RL country and then coming to the virtual country of SL and striking gold through perseverance and hard work. That experience is one that Philip Linden consciously celebrates — his favourite story is to imagine the young man in the third-world country who will make an invention in SL that will feed his family and lift him from poverty. The rags-to-riches dream story of the kind that animated the settlement of America is an important story, regardless of whether there are only a tiny percentage of actually wealthy people. The animating factor for people coming will be that dream. That’s something to take seriously; calling it a “footnote” would be like saying that your ancestors or mine coming to America and their aspirations are merely a “footnote” in American history, when they are not. Whether they fled pogroms or forced famines, whether they merely survived or struck it rich, the push and pull factors of the project called America doesn’t make “footnotes” out of things like that but makes statesmen, poets, culture.

A country with 60,000 people in it logging on regularly from the Americas, Europe, and Asia (not much from Africa or Eurasia) isn’t a country that is going to be terribly diverse. But it’s actually rather more diverse than you are prepared to give it credit for.

I’m sure you have vastly more experience in virtual worlds, obviously you’re the famous guru and I’m only the infamous antagonist. But I do think you have to think outside the MMORPG gaming box here. This isn’t gold-farming in UO or WoW. This is cashing out to RL money to pay RL bills using skills that aren’t grinding and skilling and questing but are more complex and sophisticated having to do with market determination, problem-solving, community building, legal interpretation, etc. that in my view, require a variety of disciplines and bodies of human knowledge to be brought to bear on it as it develops.

You make a very interesting comment about what it would be like to collect leaders, or even randomly selected inhabitants of everything from Habbo Hotel to Cyworld. I love that idea. I hope this Star Wars Bar kind of Metaverse Meet-Up happens even without all these game companies and the industry hangers-on in the supposedly independent world of academe. I hope that in fact the collective social pressure of all those people and their needs and wants and ideas will constitute a force for change that will be part of what goes beyond (overthrows) the game companies. Right now, we don’t really have a resident community independent of Lindens for all kind of factors, having to do with the smallness of the world, and the fact that 1/3 of the Linden staff comes from former residents. But this day will come.

I quite take your point about these latest conferences all being filled with SL cheerleaders. I think you have only click around on their sites to see what sponsors there are to understand why that is happening. If Linden Lab or Electric Sheep Company or Future Salon/Accelerating Change Foundation etc are the sponsors, then their networks will necessarily all be of a type, and all around the SL Kool-Aid nexus. But…The rest of us can’t complain if we didn’t raise the venture capital not only to make a world, but to then conference about it endlessly at funded prestigious academic venues.

Virtual worlds may not yet merit the attention of these world-class leaders of the Nobel Peace Prize caliber, let’s say. But I imagine it will happen sooner than you think. I wouldn’t have thought Harvard would show up as fast as it did in SL.

The Metaverse Roadmap isn’t likely to have significant genuine public input. It appears to be a geeky and wonky privileged and even clunky process that focuses too literally on hardware and technical advancement now for most people to be able to make meaningful input. What’s scary about it to me is that the people holding the cards close to their chests about the technological development and discussing it only among their own verhy select and vetted and apprenticed peers are indeed the ones not willing to share with others — they’re setting the bar very high by making it seem that without technical knowledge of how servers and streaming technology work, you can’t make any contribution. They’re replicating the Snowcrash memes.

That just seem wacky to me. Scientists made the nuclear bomb, too, and the rest of society and its thinkers have been catching up ever since and making sure that things like this aren’t done in a vacuum. The people of your world seem to have gone from the concerns of C.P. Snow that scientists weren’t included in high policy discussions of society and were left out by statesmen and writers, to completely overthrowing those political and literary people and saying that unless they can become conversant in technical jargon and notions they can’t play. It’s skewed again.

As for your “hours with Philip and Cory and Robin” I can only say: 30 points for you in Strategic SL, Raph, you’re coming close to beating the bosses, just a little bit more skilling and leveling and finding rares! But…Your hours are spent server-side, dude. I’ve probably spent *more* hours with them, come to think of it, but client-side, inworld, where the short end of the stick can be more painful, sitting in crashing town-meetings and struggling to communicate in half sentences typed out about things like the ridiculous hippie dope-smoking group tools and their flaws.

Really, you’re continuing to imply that what an Anshe does or anybody with business in these worlds isn’t intellectually exciting because you can only describe it as money making in the next sentence where you claim you didn’t mean to imply it wasn’t brainless.

I really have to say, Raph, that if I were going to have a really serious discussion about how to make groups work, and what groups can and can’t leverage in a virtual society, and what tools are needed for them to work, and their dangers and advantages, if I had a choice of having that discussion with Beth Noveck of NYLS who created Democracy Island, and wrote a fascinating but hugely troubling essay on groups and democracy, and who has logged on probably about 3 times since giving the initial project demonstration, or having that discussion with Anshe Chung, who probably spends 16 or even 20 hours a day in SL, I’d pick Anshe Chung. She doesn’t have 6 Phds. But she has incredibly valuable field experience. I can’t emphasize enough how you need to get out more, and find a way for people with this actual field experience to participate.

Most of these millions of people in these games don’t yet have the self-consciousness about their participation in a thing called the Metaverse to take their fate in their own hands.

Yet we need to burn it in now for elites and their advisors who think they will run this thing properly without widespread, democratic participation:

“Nothing about us/without us!”

You know, I always find it a bit amusing that names like Anshe Chung always come up when naming SL’s successes (or at least such names seem to be mentioned with the purpose illustrating success within SL), and yet during my (albeit short) time in SL, I recall Anshe Chung and the other “land barons” being reviled by the masses in the VW.

I mean, it’s obvious why these characters are celebritized, since other people will see sparkly dollar bills before their eyes and look at SL as their next “get rich quick” opportunity. But, while I was around SL, such folks were widely regarded as experience-killers.

Actually, I’d have to disagree. You don’t get diversity just from “multiple generations of technology” — for something as big and far-reaching and impactful as “the Metaverse” it seems to me that you need to have people from all walks of life, including non-technological — not just users, but thinkers and doers from a wide variety of fields. I don’t see the different viewpoints appearing in the blogs — not yet, anyway. It’s a lot of enthusiastic cheerleadering. The “non-profit” types were like Randy Moss of American Cancer Society which is already in SL and promoting it — but not people who had never heard of SL. That would be the real test — take people who are smart and involved and doing great things but never heard of any of this and see — does it work for them?

The “grounded biz folks” who want to know where the profit is are *not inworld*. They are not DOING the Metaverse but just studying about it or exploring it or talking about it. That’s my point, Raph, sorry but, as I said, you didn’t have Anshe Chung — who reportedly makes $150,000 a year from her world-creation business and who was featured on the cover of Business Week. You could all talk *about* that BW article but not include the people who *really do it* (except of course for ESC which is a sponsor).

I imagine they seem like the “usual suspects” to me because I just keep seeing the same names everywhere — but then I’m just tuning in the last 2 years or so. You’re obviously far more traveled in this field, I’m just describing how it looks in my neck of the woods mainly around SL. The panelists at this conference, SOP III, SXSW — all the same from SL. But SL is a much bigger world, and beyond SL is even more of a big world.

[Crossposted from Habitat Chronicles]

Jerry,

The difference is emphasis and framing.

No one holding conferences and making 10-year plans for the All Audio Web, or the All-encompasing Video Web (which could be cast in your all-inclusive/subsuming reasoning.) Most folks seem to acknowledge that data formats and display technologies are tools that are fit for specific purposes.

“3D Web” puts one technology in the forefront, and without any particulary compelling rationale.

BTW – I never mentioned the 2D Web, nor framed the debate in that context.

Randy

It’s interesting seeing that list of games as the first line-up of MMOs. Out of them all, Lineage and EverQuest remain in the vernacular, while all the others have marginalized to one degree or another. UO is about as obscure as M59. Lineage is strong because of its huge playerbase…but EverQuest is available to anyone playing any other Station game. All the rest just have themselves. There is no “UO2″ to inform newcomers of “UO.”

Yeah, GoogleMaps has that new toy quality, but it seems to be progressing into something honestly useful. Just give Google a bit more time to bring it up to par with mapquest for getting directions. I’ve noticed improvement since the launch. Having an overhead image overlayed with your map is actually helpful when navigating, though it does require some good spatial reasoning skills.